Stripe on Steroids: 11 Ways to Supercharge Your Online Store

Lately, some new businesses have flourished by taking Stripe as a starting point. Many companies have decided to build something on top of this popular payment gateway. Despite the company still being in the “toddler” stage — the first lines of code for the service that became Stripe were typed around 2009 — many startups and online business have noticed how easy is to build using their API.

There are two main reasons for this: Stripe has an easy-to-integrate API, and other gateways like PayPal have problems, which thanks to this API are solved.

Here’s a collection of 11 apps and services built on top of Stripe, all worth keeping an eye on. If you have another one that I missed, let me know in the comments.

An Invoice Generator

The solution provided by my company at Quaderno.io has one specific goal: create and manage invoices from any charges you make on your Stripe account. Stripe has not developed such an in-house solution so far, so Quaderno saves you all the hassle related with handling invoices of any items you sell. Just by syncing your Stripe and Quaderno accounts – it’ll take you no more than two clicks, and no code — you’ll quickly be delivering invoices to your clients. Also, if your business is based in the EU, this solution will also handle the VAT nightmare.

Customer Analytics

Imagine KISSmetrics and Stripe having a baby. That’s the best description I can imagine for Hookfeed, a tool to give you insights, not in general terms, but specifically about each of your clients.

Besides giving you other more general metrics such as current monthly revenue, for instance, this tool can be really — really! — helpful in determining what is your most profitable kind of client. In other words, by knowing exactly how profitable a particular type of client is, you’ll be able to focus your future business decisions on building for those that worth more to you.

Customer Referral Program

If there are agnostic referral platforms like ReferralCandy or Ambassador, it was about time there was one specifically created for Stripe. ReferralPop accomplishes this by providing a solution to make integrating a referral system into your app really simple. Another tool covering a similar solution is Referral SaaSQuatch which is not only ready for Stripe, but for other popular payment gateways like Recurly and Braintree.

Management for Failed Payments

Credit cards expiration, cards out of service, technical issues — none of these should be a reason not to charge your clients with a credit card. Direct debits and pay by check might be still the case for some of your clients, but a vast majority of them are going to find it easier to pay by using their credit cards.

Tools like ChurnBuster or Stunning monitor can alert you of any incidents that might occur during the billing process.

Analytics Services

Not just one, but three businesses have taken on the task of giving some shape to the data returned by Stripe API. Monthly recurring revenue calculated based on your Stripe charges? No problem. Churn rate based on charges not received? Easy!

Those are some of the calculations that solutions like Baremetrics, FirstOfficer or AbacusMetrics are aiming at. They make getting information from your financial data through your payment gateway easier. An easy way to dive into your figures without getting your hands dirty.

Upload a file, sell it with Stripe

As the name suggests, SellAFile makes selling files easy peasy: Upload the file you’ve been working on and want to sell to others — ie. PSD templates, eBooks, plugins, etc. — and this tool will give you a link to send to your buyers.

Connect Stripe with other apps

Stripe can also be teamed up with some of the most popular apps in the market, thanks to services like Zapier or Torpio. If you’re just looking for a quick hack to connect a given app to Stripe, first try Zapier. On the other hand, if you need to develop something more tailored to your needs (using webhooks and building your custom scripts) check out Torpio.